Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
ON VIOLENCE
Consider
The scrupulous judge weighs the law in his white hand
Politely he sends a man to prison for ten years
Or he says 'Go
Take this chance to be a good worker and live by the law
I wish you well'
The last sentence is more violent than the first
It condemns the man to give his life to the judge
Teach his child the judge has a right to send its father to prison
Respect the school that made the judge Build a wall round the judge's house to protect his loot
Hurry to work each morning to make guns for the judge to fire in the square
And be told to die in his own house or kill in his neighbour's
Or worse worse day after day to live quietly
So that the judge may give mercy that's harsher than prison
Consider
The man who stands in freedom on the street corner
Holds by the hand an unseen man
For twenty years this man has been mad
He is old and lies at the foot of a damp wall with his dead child in his pocket
His heart beats only to pump out his life through his wounds
He's too weak to staunch it or call for help
Who is this unseen man he holds by the hand?
Himself
If the mind had a human shape it would be this
These things were done to it by the judge who said mercy
These are the wounds of peace
The violence of freedom
More bitter than famine
Crueller than war
Deadlier than plague
It's not seen
It's hidden under the head as if that were a stone to hide truth
In such a world there is no peace
The man walks from court in freedom
The university market library broadcasting station are prisons
The street is the gallery of a prison The houses on either side are cells in a prison
Imagination
We imagine
We couldn't think unless we imagined
We couldn't work unless we imagined
We couldn't make a machine unless we imagined
We couldn't make a poem unless we imagined
We can't know everything
There's no time to see round corners
We need imagination to understand what's real
We need imagination to live in history
If we didn't imagine we'd be as slow and cumbersome as wooden puppets
We'd be in eons
We may imagine the real to be false
With a new strength a new weakness
Society needs drama (even in debased commercial forms) because in it it seeks the human
image. It must do this even when theatre degrades the human image. Great national
institutions - national theatres, national galleries and so on - promote culture but also control
and repress it. They make the whole of society a ghetto. Theatre is comparatively free of
technology. A few people in a room can make a play. This is a strength because often it frees it
from political control, in both its police and commerical forms. But it is also a weakness. Our
times are too fast and chaotic for the stages in attics and cellars, on their own, to be able to
study and recreate the human image. We also need to show how the whole of modern
technology belongs to our creative psyche. But there is a conflict between financial resources
and creative forces. In unjust society creative forces can no longer come from the state,
because it no longer represents a progressive class that flourishes on human reason: it
represents only an exploiting class and its ability to exploit. Now the creative forces of art
come from the street. There is no more folk art, it has become the kitsch of commercialism.
But street art is creative. We should not romanticize the street - as much garbage and cruelty
are found there as in the cultural institutions. But street skills and disciplines are as astringent
and liberating as those of academies. And more important, it is in the street - though we may
wish it did not have to be so - that radical innocence is most potent. Authority in unjust
society must lie, the street may lie but need not. Academies and national theatres cannot
develop the skills of art because they no longer need art. The street needs art.
We think art has its source in truth, but its source is in lies. A child asks what, why, how - the
questions of the great philosophers. It asks these questions because its brain is over-capacious
and holistic. A child asks the profoundest philosophical questions, but it asks them about its
room because that is its world. And as it grows it seeks a reason even for the stars. In that they
have meaning, the questions - how, what and why - are truthful, but the answers are
confusions and lies. The child gives the first answers itself. They are imagistic - the images
'see' its feelings. This early language expresses more than it describes, but it is intellectual and
discriminates and analyses; even the first images are symbolic because they point to the
nothingness that surrounds them. Lear tells his child 'nothing will come of nothing', but
everything comes of nothing. This is the infant's first encounter with truth, and from it comes
the dependance on art. Later it will be taught answers - but these will be lies or full of error.
Primitive societies mix error and truth in order to exist; they dig wells but worship the rain
God. Authority uses phenomena still beyond its understanding to coerce and stimulate society
- it surrounds it in mystery. The sacred is a way of keeping the world in thrall. The priests'
function is to be so possessed by illusions that they become real - that is, people act on them -
and when this is not possible, to lie. Dostoievsky's inquisitors lie to everyone except God,
whom they offend with the truth.
A society that uses a hydraulics technology may still demand belief in the rain God and found
its institutions on his existence. The society that does this is constantly torn apart. To preserve
the 'great social truth' - what society believes in order to maintain its structure - the 'truths of
society' - the knowledge it needs to exist in the world - are constantly denied. So the 'great
social truth' is a lie. Society equates the world with its culture just as the child equates the
world with its room. The child cannot escape from the life of its room and society cannot
escape from its rain God. As the child grows it puts the world into its room, not the other way
round - its mind can never leave the room because that is its psyche's foundation. As it grows
up into its parents' world they answer its truthful questions with the 'great social truth' - the
mixture of confusions and lies. A child cannot understand the science of hydraulics or the
shibboleths of economics but it can understand and live with the illusions of fairy tales and
rain Gods. Children are lied to so that they may learn to honour the truth.
A child interprets its later knowledge in terms of its earlier knowledge - of the assurance or
vertigo and suspicion it gave it. It is not that it doubts new facts, but that all its knowledge
must build on its first, early 'symbolic against nothingness' - which is not merely expressive
but discriminatory and analytic. New knowledge cannot transcend the earlier mind, the mind
that is created in radical innocence. Children's questions can never be answered. They could
not be answered even in a life after death - even God could not answer them. God is the last
person qualified to know the meaning of life, he could only make excuses. Why justify X
when you need not have created X? Why give an answer when there need have been no
question? Even if some creator could ordain the whole sequence of evolution he could not
give it meaning. Meaning comes from experience within evolution. Even if evolution had a
preconceived, determined end, this could still only be its 'meaning' for a worm - not for a
cognitive, sensate being. Even if such a being conceived the same determined end, it would
do so within its limitations - it would then be the limited creature's end, not the Pantocrators.
God could not even create his own meaning. He could exist only because we knew him. And
to love is to be in need. So the gap between Gods and human beings cannot be closed.
Christianity tries to close it by claiming that God became every man and every woman, but
clearly this is not so. To be of use religion must always claim too much - and when
circumstances change, the too much inevitably becomes grotesquely too little.
The profoundest religion is nirvana, but because it asks the unanswerable question most
honestly it is also the most fatuous. Why should nothingness hide itself in the veil of illusion?
The religion of nirvana, like all religions, depends on illusions; it cannot tell why something
should come of nothing, and certainly not why Himmler should preach the sermon on the
mount. The philosophical riddle is that there should be any questions. God would have to ask
the child the questions, and one would be as ignorant as the other. So the child must accept
responsibility for the world. What else can it do? When it asks what and why it cannot
withdraw from the world to the side like God. Children cry because they are philosophers.
Children ask what and why but must learn to ask how much, how often and when? As the first
questions cannot be silenced but persist, they are given the answers to the second questions.
And so radical innocence creates tension and, when it is confronted, the paradox. It is said that
the child is father to the man. But it is the man's duty to murder the child. He does this by his
answers and - because he also was a child - his anger. We cannot look into a human face that
is not the face of a murderer and his victim - and both these things many times.
Art is a language without grammar, because the child Christianity was shaken - so the new
force must be the Devil. The Devil is to renaissance theatre what the Gods are to Greek
theatre. As the fundamental social relations were changing, all the themes of the new drama
became available together, at once, to the first of the new dramatists, Marlowe: money (The
Jew of Malta}; expansion and imperialism (Tamburlaine); and energy, industry and science
(Dr Faustus). Dr Faustus was the most important because it created the new industrial
theology.
Technology needed a new Promethean psychology, but the owners of society needed to curb
it. Faust makes a contract with the Devil that Christ had no need to make, because it offered
him what in the Christian drama was already his: this world. This world was contained in the
next, and so God could rule without the compromises of politics and the Devil. Capitalism
cannot, it needs the Devil: the Devil frees people from God but puts them in chains.
Like the Greeks (and for the same reason) Shakespeare rewrote stories from the past. He did
not rewrite Dr Faustus, though he must have wanted to. All his plays are versions of Dr
Faustus, it is the unwritten subtitle of all of them. But Marlowe had said about Dr Faustus all
that the times needed to be said - or all that the form of ownership, and its religion and
politics, allowed to be said or could even imagine. Shakespeare could have only embellished
the play with aesthetics and he was too analytical a writer to be content with that. But
someone had to write Dr Faustus before Hamlet could meet his ghost.
Dr Faustus combines tragedy and comedy. A version of Dr Faustus without comedy ignores
the social process it is meant to be about. The Satanic force is dynamic, destructive,
irreverent, industrial and rides over corpses. The Devil is even part animal. He makes the
grotesque of primitive religion useful once more (the theatre of the absurd will trivialize it
again). Industrial, Satanic energy subverts judgement and enslaves people but provokes a
seething discontent and confused understanding which are our hope of freedom. Renaissance
society could not have been created and administered without the Devil. The machines were
laughing at our stupidities.
Shakespeare needed ghosts and witches. His patron King James wrote a book confirming their
existence. It is a common device of ruling class ideology - and also a symptom of hysteria - to
appropriate folktales and turn them into journalism. And so the witch-hunt ravaged Europe.
Witches were scotched out of copses, heaths, rural byways, village hovels - but really the
tittle-tattlers and theologians were speaking the language of the new machines: witches were
made in factories. Greek democracy sought order and needed Gods, capitalist society seeks
profit and needs the Devil.
Later when capitalism was consolidated, the enlightenment threw the Devil out of the front
door and romanticism brought him in at the back. Milton and Blake made Satan a hero, but in
romanticism he is tainted with bad habits. A malaise lingers in the romantic soul like smoke
over cities. The smoke of witches' fires blows away, but working class stench must be lived
with. Romanticism desocialized Satanic energy and made it hedonistic and anarchic - this also
relieved the tedium of bourgeois respectability, which was another consequence of capitalist
consolidation. As the nouveaux riches went up in the world the Devil even became an
aristocrat, and mill owners would have happily married their daughters to him. Well, he was a
prince. Still later, romanticism became a bridge between the witch-hunt and American
psychoanalysis (a castrated McCarthyism). Science still retains much Satanic theology -
sociobiology puts Satan in our genes and science fiction puts him in outer space. Nuclear
weapons are a recent form of the witch-hunt - they are used to threaten Empires of Darkness.
Capitalism could not survive without the Devil and his works.
As machines became more complex they took over more of society. A new social discipline
was needed to allow machines to work in peace. The social violence of capitalism was
interiorized. The effects are seen in nineteenth-century theatre: psychology determines fate
and imprisons philosophy in character. The theatre held, as emphatically as ever, that our lives
are not in our control; but in place of Gods and Devils it made the unconscious our fate. When
the Greeks submitted to their Gods they discovered their humanity, but we can only submit to
ourselves, and create values and understand the world in the image of our own anger and
triviality. In this submission we do not gain tragic status but are merely criminals with the
wounded pride of victims. God is Father, Satan is Son and psychology is Holy Ghost.
Ibsen's Master Builder falls like Satan, but not to escape from the theological tomb of heaven
- he falls to his death. Drama was at a turning point. Soon dramatists would clutch at
mysticism like naked men clutching at shrouds. Ibsen was a revolutionary-conservative. He
increasingly turned social relations (using the tensions that disturbed social order) into
mysticism or the frankly occult. The Master Builder is tempted not by Satan but by the trolls
he hears deep in the mountain. The rock will not become a holy door as it did for Oedipus and
Christ. And it is not Antigone's stone room. She shut out the Gods and hung alone - and there
were only the stone walls, stone roof, stone floor, the rope and her body which turned to rags
and bones and fell to a little heap on the ground under the hook beside the untouched food in a
bowl which might have been a tin can. No one entered her room for two thousand years till
the Devil came and led her out as a witch.
'Theatre has only one subject: justice.' (interview with British playwright Edward Bond)